The secret cost of pivoting to video

MIC’S WEBSITE AUDIENCE is tanking by millions of readers a month—and if it continues, it just may save online journalism.

That’s because Mic is another example of the cautionary tale set by publications that pivot to video.

Hundreds of journalists have lost their jobs while shiny-object-chasing publishers are no closer to creating cohesive video strategies to replace the traffic those writers were producing. Publishers who pivoted to video have forfeited the majority of their hard-won native audiences in only a year of churning out undifferentiated, bland chunks of largely aggregated “snackable” video. That’s no one’s idea of success.

A pivot to video is really a “pivot to declining pageviews,” as Digiday noted. The numbers are chilling: “According to data from comScore, the publishers that pivoted to video this summer have seen at least a 60 percent drop in their traffic in August compared to the same period from a year ago.”